This opening, in Cooney’s elegant and poetically atmospheric prose, introduces us to one world among three: Athe, the world of mortals, the Valwode, world of the gentrykind, and Bana, world of goblins. At the same charity affair, we’re introduced to her best friend Chaz, a high-society gentleman with similar levels of wealth and a preference for wearing dresses – though to call Chaz a gentleman is to lie about his true nature. Desdemona lacks her mother’s fiery investment in the cause: the sight of the factory girls in borrowed high-society gowns makes her feel a little disgusted. Desdemona is the daughter of wealth, a frankly appalling degree of wealth, and her mother (estranged from Desdemona’s contemptuous father) is a social reformer using that wealth to draw attention to the plight of the less fortunate. We first meet Desdemona, our eponymous protagonist, at a charity affair: a benefit for the factory girls with phossy jaw. At any other length, it would lose something of its impact: shorter, and it would not have time to build up the momentum for its series of punches longer, and the effect of its short, sharp, furious poetic dismantling of assumptions would be diluted away from its pointed achievement. She has a strong – even glittering – track record with short stories, but Desdemona and the Deep is her first book-length work.ĭesdemona and the Deep is a really effective novella. Cooney won the World Fantasy Award for her collection Bone Swans. The plot is hectic, but drags just a bit in places – but there is always the music of the writing, and the comic coloration, and the engaging and just awakening Desdemona to keep us entranced.Ĭ.S.E.
The best thing about this book is the prose – lush images and glorious words mix in a sometimes comic and sometimes earnest olio. Her father must be responsible, but how to make some sort of amends? Thus she ends up on a mission to find and free the daughter of the King of the Kobolds, and so she and Chaz end up traveling to both worlds below, where she and (and Chaz) not only save the worlds… but find their real selves.
This clue leads her to realize something horrible when the next day there is a disaster at one of H.H.’s mines. Desdemona is deeply bored and finally escapes home, where she happens to overhear her father arranging a deal with the King of the Kobolds, who seems none too happy. Mannering, and we meet her and her best friend Chaz (who is a woman in a man’s body) at a charity function arranged by her mother. Desdemona is the fashionable daughter of mining tycoon H.H.
This is the third of her Breakers novellas (though it stands completely alone), centered around a set of houses called Breakers in three different worlds: the human world, the world below, of the Gentry, and the deep world of the kobolds. Cooney‘s Desdemona and the Deep for quite a while, and having arrived, it doesn’t disappoint.
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